The recent controversy over a Fox News segment on “no-go zones” in France, culminating in Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo’s threat to sue the American channel, was a surreal experience for French-speakers, connoisseurs of France, and, above all, the French themselves. For while the original remarks by Fox interviewee Nolan Peterson contained some fuzziness and error, the existence of such zones has been universally acknowledged in France for years: by members of all political parties, including Hidalgo’s own Socialists, and all media, including the leftist media. There is controversy over what is to be done about these “no-go zones.” But there is no more controversy over their existence than there is controversy over the sun rising in the east and setting in the west.
Of course, the French do not use the expression “no-go zones,” because the French speak French. Their expression is “zones de non-droit,” literally “lawless zones,” so described because the police are incapable of maintaining a regular enough presence in them to enforce the law. The police are reputed barely even to risk venturing into the zones de non-droit—hence the colloquial English expression “no-go zone” provides an apt translation.
As applied, above all, to some of the notoriously rough areas on the periphery of France’s major urban centers—the famous banlieues—the term first gained wide currency about 15 years ago. French media were rife with stories of police officers and other representatives of public authority coming under attack upon entering such neighborhoods. In 2001, French criminologists Alain Bauer and Xavier Raufer established a list of 19 such “lawless” or “no-go” zones. In a 2002 study, Vincent Trémolet de Villers explained, “This list contains only those neighborhoods that are in a state of quasi-permanent secession: i.e., at any time of the day, the police, the fire department or even a pizza delivery man cannot enter these neighborhoods without risking attack.”
Zones de non-droit is not an official administrative designation, and it is difficult to say exactly how many such zones exist in France today. Zones urbaines sensibles—roughly, “fragile urban zones”—are a separate matter, and it has been a mistake on the part of American commentators to call all 751 ZUS “no-go zones.” That list of economically disadvantaged neighborhoods was established in 1996 strictly for purposes of urban development. The ministry of the interior maintains a list of 80 “priority security zones” (ZSP), which are particularly hard hit by crime and violence. Of these, no less than three are in Paris proper and another six on the outskirts of Paris.
As minister of the interior from 2002 to 2004, Nicolas Sarkozy made combating the zones de non-droit one of his top priorities, and he took up the theme again when he became president in 2007. But it is not only the security-conscious French right that employs the expression: Socialist and even Communist politicians do as well. This is hardly surprising, as many leftists have served as mayors of the areas in question. In 2011, for instance, former Socialist minister of the interior Daniel Vaillant challenged Sarkozy’s record on tackling urban violence, insisting that “the zones de non-droit have spread under Sarkozy.”
The Socialist politician with perhaps the most intimate knowledge of conditions in the banlieues, Malek Boutih, has been warning about the spread of lawlessness in France’s urban slums for at least as long as Sarkozy, in terms that are, if anything, more dramatic. In 2002, Boutih, then president of the French antiracism organization SOS Racisme, told Le Monde that drastic action needed to be taken against the “barbarians of the cités.” Cités (a cognate of our “cities”) is the colloquial term for France’s sprawling public housing projects, which have become notorious centers for drug-dealing and other forms of illegal trafficking and where criminal gangs are known to lay down their own law in the absence of the forces of order.
“There’s no more time to wait,” Boutih told Le Monde. “One has to get into them, hit hard, vanquish them, retake control of territories that have been abandoned to them by local officials out for their own peace and quiet.” Boutih concluded that “either one retakes control of the cités or one descends into large-scale crime.”
Is Hidalgo also going to sue her fellow Socialists Vaillant and Boutih? Or does she prefer the noncolloquial English expression “lawless zones” to “no-go zones” and think that the former might be better for Paris’s international image?
A second mistake that has affected the American discussion has been the assumption that these zones are Muslim per se. Reflecting recent patterns of immigration to France, the population of the disadvantaged ban-lieues is mixed. While a large portion of residents have roots in France’s former North African colonies, where Islam is the predominant religion, there is also a significant portion with roots in sub-Saharan Africa, and the latter are as likely to be Christian as Muslim.
The mistake started a decade ago, when many American commentators treated the riots that broke out in the banlieues in 2005 as “Muslim riots.” Apart from their being overwhelmingly young and male, the rioters represented a cross-section of the population of the neighborhoods where the violence erupted. Even if this means that a majority came from traditionally Muslim families, there is no evidence Islam or Islamic organizations played any role in the outbreak or progression of the rioting. Indeed, criminologist Alain Bauer noted that neighborhoods where Islamic organizations were strongest remained relatively calm.
Nonetheless, it is equally true that as the institutions of the French state have withdrawn from the “lawless” or “no-go” zones, Islamic institutions and authorities—often self-styled “authorities” of a particularly radical bent—have moved in to propose an alternative source of order. There is no more controversy about this in France than there is about the existence of the zones themselves. A 2004 report by French domestic intelligence, revealed by Le Monde, identified no less than 300 neighborhoods, comprising some 1.8 million inhabitants, that had become or were in the process of becoming Islamic “ghettos.”
The report cited, among other indicators of this development, the practice of polygamy in some families, an increasing tendency to wear “religious clothing,” and a “degradation of the status of women”—in particular, women of North African origin who have adopted a Western lifestyle and “who are regularly victims of insults and violence.” The report noted the regular presence of fundamentalist preachers in over 200 of these neighborhoods and warned about their influence on “young people and children, who are taken under the wing of numerous associations working in the domains of sport or education.” The increasing influence of Islamic fundamentalism was especially evident in the regular public schools, where teachers had noted a “radicalization of religious practices (Ramadan, dietary prohibitions), a certain calling into question of courses in history, natural science, and physical education,” and where “young girls are pressured to wear headscarves by the male pupils.” The proselytism begun by radical preachers over a decade ago has since borne fruit in, among other things, the flow of French youth to Syria to take part in jihad.
Malek Boutih, whose parents emigrated to France from Algeria, is particularly emphatic about the dangers posed by the growing influence of radical imams in the banlieues. In the aftermath of January’s deadly homegrown terror attacks, he denounced the rise of what he described as “a new form of Nazism, Islamo-Nazism” and called for certain urban neighborhoods to be placed under the direct tutelage of the central government.
“We have a problem with ghettos,” Boutih told the weekly Le Point, “a problem with anti-Semitism, a problem with the application of secular norms. When special opening hours are proposed for women at the pool in certain municipalities, it’s already a problem. . . . When parents refuse to allow their daughter to wear shorts in gym class, it’s a problem.” Updating his earlier analysis, Boutih accused local officials of having “made deals” with both the “thugs” and the fundamentalists. “We can no longer permit the flourishing of supermarkets for drugs in the projects,” Boutih continued, “which, as we see, support networks in which gangsters and Islamo-Nazis join hands.”
When one consults French sources, what could seem like the most preposterous claim made by Nolan Peterson on Fox—that he had seen a young resident of the ban-lieues wearing an Osama bin Laden T-shirt—appears not so unlikely after all. “It’s become a war-cry, a figure on T-shirts, an idol,” Trémolet de Villers wrote in his study of the zones de non-droit. “When the television, the radio, the journalists come to interview the young people from the projects, they repeat, ‘Osama is too cool.’ One writes his name on the walls of the city, preferably on those of synagogues. One shouts, ‘Long live Bin Laden!’ ”
Is Hidalgo also going to sue Trémolet de Villers? He is now the editorial page editor of Le Figaro, France’s leading conservative daily.
But however mind-bending the spectacle of French politicians and media denouncing allusions to conditions that have been described and debated by French observers themselves for over a decade now, the most surreal moment was provided by the tour of Paris’s 19th arrondissement that Hidalgo gave her New York counterpart, Bill de Blasio. The point of the visit appears to have been to refute Fox News and provide an example of successful integration à la française.
As it happens, a large swath of the 19th constitutes one of the 80 high-crime, high-violence “priority security zones” identified by the ministry of the interior. But the 19th is certainly a more pleasant and varied destination than some of the dreary and troubled banlieues that lie just beyond its borders. Perhaps its most charming attraction is the beautifully landscaped Buttes-Chaumont Park, with its jagged cliffs rising out of a manmade lake. It was here in 2004 that a 22-year-old named Cherif Kouachi would meet with like-minded residents to train for jihad. The group, which specialized in the dispatch of mujahedeen to Iraq, came to be known to the police as the “Buttes-Chaumont group.” In January 2005, just before his scheduled departure, Cherif Kouachi was arrested. His elder brother Saïd was also arrested, but never charged, in connection with the Buttes-Chaumont group.
Ten years later, the Kouachi brothers burst into the offices of the French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo with Kalashnikovs blazing. Leaving the scene of the massacre, one of the brothers calmly raised his gun to the sky and declared, “We have avenged the Prophet!”
If the 19th is a French success story, the country clearly does not need failures.
John Rosenthal is the author of The Jihadist Plot: The Untold Story of Al-Qaeda and the Libyan Rebellion.
